LITMIR.BIZ

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friends live in New Jersey, where she often goes on the weekends for “shows.” At lunch, we look at their homemade Angelfire.com websites, one of which has an image of a decomposing baby carcass on the home page. But mostly they post pictures of themselves sweaty and piled high in front of makeshift stages. It’s hard to tell who’s in the band and who is just hanging out. She points out Shane, a pretty blond she has a crush on. His website is called Str8OuttaCompton, a reference I won’t get for another ten years. In one of Shane’s photos, a picture of a concert in a cramped basement, I notice a boy, tan with chubby cheeks and vacant blue eyes, moshing off to the side, a bandanna tied around his head. “Who’s that?” I ask.

      

      “His name is Igor,” Juliana tells me. “He’s Russian. Vegan, too. He’s really nice.”

      “He’s cute,” I say.

      That night, an instant-message bubble pops up from Pyro0001. I accept.

      Pyro0001: Hey, it’s Igor.

      

      For the next three months, Igor and I instant message for hours every night. I get home around three thirty, and he comes home at four, so I make myself a snack and wait for his name to appear. I want to let him say “hey” first, but usually I can’t wait that long. We talk about animals. About school. About the injustices of the world, most of them directed at innocent animals who can’t defend themselves against the evils of humanity. He’s a man of few words, but the words he uses are perfect to me.

      I am no longer opposed to the computer. I am in love with it.

      No guys like me at school. Some ignore me while others are outright cruel, but none want to kiss me. I’m still distraught over a seventh-grade breakup and refuse to attend parties I know my ex will be at. At this point, my heartbreak has lasted twenty-four times as long as our relationship.

      Igor wants to see a photo of me, so I send him one of me against my bedroom wall, on which I have drawn trees and nudes with a Sharpie. My hair hangs in a yellow, flat-ironed curtain, and I am cracking a glossy half smile. Igor says I look like Christina Aguilera. He’s a punk, so it seems more like a factual assessment than a compliment, but I am thrilled.

      We message through dinner, through fights with our parents. He describes how quiet it is when he gets home, how his parents aren’t back until eight. He says “brb” when he goes to the door to get his delivery dinner, which is usually eggplant parm minus the parm. He tells me that he goes to the kind of school that has popular kids and losers, jocks, and freaks. A big public school with a class full of strangers. My school is supposed to be different, small and creative and inclusive, but sometimes I feel just as isolated as he does. I start describing kids at school as “bimbos” and “fakes,” words I never would have thought to use before he introduced them. Words he’ll understand and that will draw him to me.

      

      When I go on vacation with my family, I ask the hotel office to let me use the computer so I can send Igor an email on Valentine’s Day. He tells me he doesn’t want to send me a new picture of himself because he’s had “some pimples” lately. My father is irritated that I take the time away from the beach to sit in a windowless office with a woman smoking Newports and send love notes to someone I’ve never met. He doesn’t get it. He doesn’t even have email.

      Juliana says that Igor’s friend Shane says that Igor says he really likes me. This emboldens me to ask him to talk on the phone. He seems eager and takes my number but never calls. Juliana says she thinks he may be self-conscious about his accent.

      Trixiebelle86: If u don’t like the fone may-b we cud meet in person?

      He agrees to meet me the following Saturday on Saint Mark’s Place. He’ll take the train in, and we’ll find each other on the corner. I go, in a tank top, cargo pants, and a shrunken denim jacket, even though it’s freezing. I’m so nervous, I arrive twenty minutes early. He isn’t there yet. I wait another half hour, but he never comes. I try and look relaxed as pierced NYU kids and pink-haired Asian girls stream past me. I go home and log on, but he isn’t there either.

      The next day, he messages me:

      Pyro0001: Sorry. Grounded. May-B sum other time.

      

      Gradually, Igor stops messaging me. When he does make contact, it’s only to respond. He never initiates. Every time that ping sounds, signaling a message, I run to the computer, hoping it’s him. But it’s only John, a kid from a nearby school who excels at break dancing, or my friend Stephanie, complaining about her Peruvian father’s strict rules about skirt length. Igor doesn’t ask me any questions anymore. Our relationship had hummed with possibility: the possibility of meeting, of liking each other even more in person than we did online, of falling in love with each other’s eyes and smell and sneakers. Now it’s over before it began. I wonder whether I can consider him an ex.

      One day, in late summer, Juliana IMs me.

      Northernstar2001: Lena Igor is dead.

      Trixiebelle86: What???

      Northernstar2001: Shane IMd me. He had a methadone overdose, choked on his own tongue in his basement. Its fukked. He’s an only child and his parents don’t like speak English.

      Trixiebelle86: Did Shane say if Igor stopped liking me?

      

      I’m not sure who to tell because I’m not sure who will care, and I don’t want to explain the whole thing to anyone. It was impossible for my parents to understand the reality of Igor when he was alive, so why would they get it when he was dead?

      A year later I have to change my screen name because a boy at school, a massive hairy boy with a face like a Picasso painting, sends me an email saying he’s going to rape me and cover me in barbecue sauce. He’s the only guy who likes me in that way, but I wish he wouldn’t. He mentions having a machete and attaches a photograph of a kitten that has been stuffed inside a bottle and left to die. My father is justifiably angry and calls my uncle, who is a lawyer and says the police need to be involved. For the first and last time, I am escorted home from school by the cops. When they go to his house, they find he has printed and saved all of our instant messages, pages and pages of them. One of the officers implies I shouldn’t have been so nice to him if I didn’t like him “that way.” I tell them I just felt sorry for him. They say I should be more careful in the future. I am ashamed.

      My new screen name includes my real name and is only shared with select friends and family, but I transfer all my contacts, so I can always see who is logged on when. One day, in my here to chat bar, I see him: Pyro0001. The world goes fast, then slow again, the way it does sometimes when I get up to pee in the night and the whole house sounds like it’s saying Lena, Lena, Lena.

      “Hey,” I type.

      The name disappears.

      I walk around for the rest of that day like I’ve seen a ghost. I type his full name into multiple search engines, looking for an obituary or some evidence that he existed. I mean, Juliana

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